“Why…… Why did you do it!”

Blue veins protruded on Grand Duke Merriott’s broad forehead, as if enduring that moment was difficult.

After a brief silence, he finally opened his eyes to face Hugo, and unexpected words flowed from his lips.

“Because I…… hoped my son would be safe.”

Janice Denver.

She was a somewhat broken woman, just as engraved in Hugo’s memory.

Of course, when Grand Duke Merriott first fell in love with Janice, she was nothing but bright, as if absorbing all the light in the world.

So he didn’t know.

That behind such excessively bright and vibrant light, an equally dense darkness might be hidden.

She occasionally displayed inexplicable impulsive behaviors and obsessive actions, and sometimes shed tears while revealing her unfortunate family history.

What man wouldn’t weaken before the tears of the woman he loves?

Because Janice was always honest with her feelings and had such a lovely smile full of vitality, the Grand Duke considered even those aspects part of her charm and vowed to embrace her pain as well.

But sadly, that was only a small part of the darkness hidden within her.

Janice’s inner state was more damaged than he thought.

Grand Duke Merriott intended to embrace even such a broken woman, but Janice’s condition only worsened, becoming more severe after giving birth.

Suffering from delusions, one night she secretly moved with the newborn baby and thereafter prevented the Grand Duke from seeing his son, allowing only herself to meet with him.

Thus, more than ten years passed in vain.

During that time, Janice’s paranoia deepened with each passing year, and her frequency of suddenly changing from gentle to volatile toward her lover increased.

“I know everything. You’re trying to abandon me now, aren’t you? You’re already tired of me. All you want from me is just that precious son of yours—son, son, son! All you ask is to see him. And yet there’s something strange about how you try to persuade me with kind words every time…… Ah, I get it. You’re planning to abandon me and take only your son away when I let my guard down because of those empty words…… Right? Come to think of it, I saw some man standing outside my house yesterday. Did you send him to kill me?”

No matter how much he denied it, she hardly listened.

Or rather, it would be more accurate to say she had reached a state where she couldn’t listen.

The Grand Duke still couldn’t forget what she blurted out while frantically biting her nails and pacing around the hotel room during one of their rare meetings.

“I couldn’t bear to live without you. But if I die alone, you’ll live happily with my son, won’t you? I hate that…… I can’t let you be happy without me…… Yes, it would be better if the child dies with me when I die. He came from my body, so that’s only natural! And only then will you…… suffer and never forget me for the rest of your life, right?”

Janice’s condition seemed to have already progressed to a serious level.

He had been urging her to seek hospital treatment for ten years already, but Janice’s stubbornness was tenacious.

To think she would kill his son whom he hadn’t seen even once since the day he was born.

After spewing venomous words, Janice would, as always, cry and blame herself a few minutes later, begging for forgiveness.

And afterward, she would find stability in the Grand Duke’s comforting words and return to being an affectionate lover, nestling in his arms.

But after that incident, the Grand Duke couldn’t even sleep, thinking that such a thing might really happen if Janice lost her mind for a moment.

Worried about his son, the Grand Duke demanded to know the child’s whereabouts more frequently than before, but each time he was met with cold rejection.

Nevertheless, Grand Duke Merriott, who had since ascended to the position of family head, intended to keep his promise to Janice.

Only by taking her, the mother, as his official wife could he reunite with his son whom she had kept hidden, and finally live together.

The only concern was Janice’s deteriorating condition.

So the Grand Duke made a decision.

In the letter informing Janice that he had finally become the family head, he also strongly urged her to be admitted to a mental hospital for treatment before their wedding.

He also added that he would take good care of their son in the meantime, so she need not worry.

But Janice’s mental illness was already too severe to accept the Grand Duke’s intentions at face value.

She never shook off her paranoid delusion that she was being deceived by the Grand Duke and many others, and she misinterpreted his intentions.

It was quite some time later when the Grand Duke received a reply from Janice.

The contents were as follows:

By the time you receive this letter, I will have already hanged myself and been buried in the ground.

How meticulously you wrote that letter about putting me in a mental hospital and taking my son away.

I’m not the one being abandoned. I’m abandoning and cursing you.

The only good news for you is that I didn’t kill your son, but you will never see that child.

Because the only person who knows whose son he is and where he is has already died.

The Grand Duke was shocked by this devastating news but also relieved that his son was alive.

And after the shock subsided, he made every effort to find his son.

These efforts continued even after he entered a loveless marriage, yielding to the pressure from his vassals about continuing the family line.

But each time, all that returned was a deep sense of despair with no end in sight.

That was the background behind his decision to leave his mansion on Upper Side Avenue No. 3 with a sense of resignation.

Grand Duke Merriott, who had confessed the entire situation to Hugo, slowly opened his mouth again.

“I’ve seen you once.”

A faint happiness spread across Grand Duke Merriott’s face, which had been serious throughout, as if recalling that time.

“It was the day Janice gave birth. The sight of you just born, the moment I held you, so tiny, in my arms for so long…… for so very long, it remained etched in my heart, never to be erased.”

The fact that the Grand Duke had seen him before was also something Hugo didn’t know.

Hugo stared blankly at his father’s wrinkled face, at a loss for words in the face of these successive shocking truths.

“Every year around the time of your birth, I would try to gauge how much you might have grown by now. Watching the neighbor’s child playing in the street grow taller and become a fine young man, I thought you too must have grown day by day, and I…… couldn’t capture those precious moments with my own eyes. I even made such uncharacteristic laments. But now seeing you all grown up……”

Grand Duke Merriott’s affectionate gaze fell upon Hugo.

He quickly wiped away his tears and composed his expression.

“You don’t have to call me father. You don’t even have to think of me as one. But……”

“……”

“Couldn’t you just show your face occasionally, thinking of it as keeping an idle old man company?”

Grand Duke Merriott tried to speak with his characteristically cold face, pretending to be calm, but his sincerity was all the more clearly revealed, almost crudely.

“I missed watching you grow up, but at least I want to see you living happily as you age…… Yes, even that might be selfish of me now……”

Grand Duke Merriott lowered his head and quietly murmured to himself during Hugo’s long silence.

Even Yvonne was waiting eagerly with desperate eyes for Hugo to speak.

“I don’t know if you’re aware, but I’m planning to hold a wedding in Vertis soon.”

Hugo slowly rose from his seat again.

His gaze was still avoiding Grand Duke Merriott, but the reason was completely different from before.

Hugo’s lips, which had been awkwardly swallowing dryly, finally parted.

“But sadly, my family seats are empty. If you have nowhere else to sit…… you can sit there.”

It meant he was asking his father to attend his wedding as a father.

Reading this intention, the expressions of both DGrand uke Merriott and Yvonne momentarily softened, like people unable to believe what they were hearing.